eBay Finally Gives Up Looking For Mythical Skype Synergies

from the it's-all-over dept

When eBay first surprised plenty of folks by buying Skype in 2005, the company insisted that there were plenty of synergies between the two companies -- despite them being quite hard for anyone to see (and for eBay management to explain). They trotted out a couple of ideas that were easily shown to be false. All of this was finally confirmed last year when eBay wrote off much of the acquisition. Now, finally, eBay is admitting that there really are no synergies between the two, even though it apparently spent about two years trying desperately to find them. In talking about how Skype faltered after merging with eBay, Skype's latest General Manager admits that looking for synergies between the auction business and the VoIP business are a thing of the past: "There is less focus at eBay today on finding the place where eBay and Skype intersect on the web, on using mashups to create a new communications paradigm for eBay, and more focus on Skype growing its business and eBay growing its business." Why that only cost a few billion dollars to figure that out.

oh

Maybe ebay should have just paid the 30 bucks a year like the rest of us for all the long distance they needed instead of hoping to save "over time" on bills by buying the whole company!(yes its a joke...)

while I don't think that there is a synergy with voip and auctions there could be with web stores. I know that ebay does have Prostores and if they offered those customer's a way to have 800 number for sales purposes it could've worked.

...and would you want some half-baked bidder calling you? If I could paint 'SECURITY RISK' in lights on the Skype-Ebay synergy, I would do so in a heartbeat. The ONLY thing that made sense was to offer an alert system utilising Skype chat whereby you'd be alerted (via text) on bids, sales, questions, etc. - but it should only have ever linked back to the site.

Sell Skype

I've heard a rumor that Skype might be sold to Google. Since Google already owns Grandcentral.com, this would make some sense. Tying all that together does have the potential for being a nice cash cow.

I could see the Grandcentral system being sold to businesses and tied into their PBX systems. (Stand alone systems)

Skype and Grandcentral for small businesses, especially with 800 numbers also has some potential.

Even academia treads the Skype acquisition as a pr

Researchers out of Emory University have traced the arguments for and against the Skype aquisition and packed them into two teaching cases. (Case A, Case B) . While the first case is fairly neutral, the follow up clearly points at Ebay's failure to integrate Skype and monetize on the cretated hype:

"eBay’s recent foray into social commerce by creating more social network communities around specific categories did not seem to directly involve the Skype application. But then again, maybe lowering expectations might be a good strategy this time around…"